Pages

Friday, 12 October 2012

scars make your body more interesting

“The potential for engagement is more
exciting than the engagement itself.”

I shouldn't be so het up about those
words. I wasn't part of the discussion; I don't know the context.
They were quoted by Catherine
Love in her record of BACDialogue and reading them felt like
being bitten by a rottweiler. Partly I recoiled because they were said
in a discussion about (but, Catherine assures me, weren't necessarily
a response to) the Tino Sehgal show These
Associations at Tate Modern. But they also sharpened into focus
something I've been thinking about in a semi-conscious way for the
past few weeks: about the audience's responsibility for their own
engagement.

I'm a bit obsessed with the Sehgal.
I've been twice and had incredible encounters with the performers
both times. One man, talking about his fraught relationship with his
mother, who died a few months ago, made me laugh so much tears
spilled from my eyes. Another man's mother story gave me a model for
living. There's a woman using the piece as an opportunity to gather
advice on her recent decision to separate – she hopes temporarily –
from her boyfriend of eight years; he is her ideal partner, and she
adores him, but she isn't sure she knows who she is and would like
some time alone to find out. Another woman told me about her
partner's infidelity, and startled herself when she confessed to me –
the first time she had articulated this aloud – that sometimes when
she fucks him she feels like she's fucking her. In return, I was more
honest with her about my own life than I've been with almost all of
my friends.

The first time I went, I was puzzled by
the terms of engagement: I hadn't read anything about the work, and
had no idea that people would talk to me. I was with a friend; we
planned to watch for ten minutes then have a squizz round the Tanks.
An hour later, we had to wrench ourselves away. After the first
person came to talk to us, about the benefits of downsizing in later
life, we weren't sure whether to approach others or wait. We decided
to wait, preferring the serendipity, and the elimination of the risk
that we might judge people by their exterior. One man who spoke to us
had spent time in Mao's China, where everyone wore a uniform and
individuality had apparently been erased. Later he went to Japan and
realised that he was looking at people's clothes, not their faces. In
China, without individualised clothing to distract him, he had looked
for character in people's features, in their eyes.

The second visit I was alone; I worried
I would feel self-conscious, standing around waiting for people to
approach me, but the piece itself works against that: they are all
standing around, and even when they become absorbed in the task of
electrifying the space, I can feel performers' eyes glancing at me,
choosing the moment to come and speak. Yes, some of the conversations
are more meaningful than others – but the best are shockingly
illuminating, the way encounters with strangers can be. Again, an
honesty is possible among strangers that somehow isn't in other
conversation; mulling on the second visit, I remembered Uninvited
Guests' Love
Letters Straight From Your Heart, and how I felt able to tell a
story in that room I hadn't told to anyone else, and so let someone
out of my heart to whom I'd been struggling to say goodbye.

It also occurred to me that These
Associations is actually a thrilling piece of theatre,
recontextualised, and that its driving impulse is similar to that
behind Chris
Goode & Co's 9. Making a space for people to present a brief
self-portrait, and through that making an argument for listening to
each other, being more generous towards each other, and finding the
extraordinary within the everyday. The engagement here is exciting
because people are exciting. Just the ways people exist and survive
all the shit the world throws at them are exciting. If you make the
time to see them that way.

The engagement question took me back to
Carnesky's
Tarot Drome, which I saw in the middle of September. I'd piled
too much expectation on it – I'm still angry with myself for not
seeing Carnesky's
Ghost Train in the years of overwork and disenchantment – and
half of it was disappointing: the wrestling match was too stagy and
rowdy, and I'm too fussy about music to tolerate a band I don't like
playing substandard glam-rock, even if they are accompanied by
cape-swishing rollerderby
queens.

The first segment, though, was
mesmerising – and puzzling, because most of the people in the room
with me seemed to be treating it as a diversion, a game. To explain:
I have no truck with the tarot. I do have an aunt who reads the cards
(and goes to church, and will read your future in the sludge that
sinks through a cup of Greek coffee), and find her wide-reaching
spirituality basically quite weird. I know it's hokum – but the
world Carnesky created, of embodied tarot figures, drew me in until
it became, however momentarily, a place of belief. Justice handed me
a scroll, which read (something like) mercy is more important than
justice. Death cracked through the tight skin that imprisoned her to
emerge free. The High Priestess enveloped me in her silken wings then
gave me a message; I didn't keep it, because the rational part of me
knows it was about as meaningful as a fortune-cookie platitude, but
in that moment, in that room, its fillip of encouragement, to embrace
the possibilities of self-transformation, made me glow.

Time and again, I felt the room and the
chatting of the audience melt away. When the Empress held my gaze as
she filled my hands with earth and we spread its soft grains across
her leg. When I asked Strength whether strength is something we can
learn or must find within ourselves, and she pressed her head against
mine, as though to impart some knowledge to me. When the Hermit used
her shawl to enclose us in a tent and, in a delicious cockney accent,
told me one of her old dad's favourite sayings: happiness isn't
something we journey towards, but through. So simple, so easily
forgotten.

It's nonsense, it's nothing, I know.
But cynicism is so easy, isn't it? Allowing yourself to be
transported, to exist spiritually, just for a night, to look people
deep in the eyes and hold their hands and allow messages to pass on
an electric current from brain to brain, to do all that fearlessly,
or at least, without fear of embarrassment: isn't that harder? And
could that willingness be what makes the encounter live up to its
potential?

I talked about some of this with Peter
McMaster when we worked together during Dialogue's September
residency at BAC. Peter was there for two weeks making a scratch of a
new show, Yeti;
neither of us knew what would happen if I spent a bit of time
in his rehearsal room, but we figured we might as well give it a go.
For an hour a day for four days, we sat together and talked: about
questions emerging from the making of Yeti, and Peter's itchy
feelings around “being an artist”, and what it is to be a solo
performer exploring solitude, and ideas of masculinity, and
entitlement, and the transition from adolescence to adulthood, and
the loveliness and naivety of the Neil Young song Heart of Gold. I asked more questions, and told him about shows I'd
seen that responded to his thinking in some way. Carnesky came up
because we were talking about connection with an audience;
previously, Peter said, critics have written that his work is
naval-gazing – and he was grateful for that jolt, because it made
him think much harder about his relationship with the people
watching.

How does I become we? This question
haunted almost every conversation we had. For Peter, it had a couple
of specific applications: in personal terms, how does the
self-absorbed I that is the adolescent open up to the world outside,
to accept the influence and difference of a lover, and to become a
useful member of society? And, as a theatre-maker, particularly the
maker of a solo show concerned with investigating solitude as an
idea, how does the I in the centre of the room become we with the
people watching? In his second scratch of Yeti, he found one answer:
squatting on his haunches, naked to the waist, he began moving within
the circle contained by the audience's chairs, gently brushing the
legs of each person as he passed them. I didn't know until later that
it wasn't premeditated: he touched the first person by accident and
carried it on. In the room, it was a moment of shivery connection,
the touch of skin on skin a ritual of communion.

“How does I become we?” became a
pressing question for me too, particularly in relation to the writing
I've been doing on here. Because it's all about bloody me. If you
read what I wrote the day after that scratch, about Motor
Vehicle Sundown, you won't find out an awful lot about Andy
Field's piece, but you will learn quite a bit about my warped
relationship with driving. I don't know what I'm doing on here –
it's all an experiment, a reaching towards, to what I don't know –
but I guess at root I'm asking something of anyone reading too: that
you bring something of yourself to this engagement.

I was accused of falling in love with
Peter but I didn't, not in that way – and thank goodness, because
I'm not sure I could have had the conversations with him that I did
if a crush had been in the room. But I did fall in love with his
striving towards betterness, with his search for meaning, with his
reaching for generosity, most of all with his readiness not to be
cynical. The first three scratches of Yeti that I saw, Peter began by
explaining something of the show: that he was alone, and thinking
about solitude. The last one opened differently: tonight, he told us,
I am full of heart. The joy, the sheer human loveliness, of
encountering someone willing to say that out loud.

“The potential for engagement is more
exciting than the engagement itself.” Think that long enough and
cynical is what you become. I know I was, maybe a decade ago, when it
seemed nothing I saw in a theatre was as good as I wanted it to be,
and I stopped going. Will Eno's Thom
Pain (based on nothing) I made an exception for, and kick myself
now for being a bad audience member and not giving it full attention.
Eno's writing in Thom Pain seems to bristle with cynicism, but that's
because the character is so brokenly defensive: underneath it's as
tender as a bruise.

I saw Thom Pain again in the searing
new production at
the Print Room, with John Light playing Thom with a perpetually
insulted English accent, five days after seeing Oh,
the Humanity at Soho, and was struck by the consonance between
them. Like Thom, the sports coach in Behold the Coach, In a Blazer,
Uninsured reels from the loss of love; like Thom, he is negociating
with fear, “the very thing that's kept us alive, the thing that
says to us: Don't cross the street without looking both ways first;
Don't speak your mind and certainly never your heart.” Fear, says
Thom, can be defined as: “1. Any of the discrete parts of the face,
as in the eyes or mouth, or eyes”, and sure enough, faces conceal
nothing in Oh, the Humanity. “The human face,” says the airline
worker in Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently, “is a cry for help.” The
photographer and his assistant in The Bully Composition are
fascinated by the silent betrayals in the audiences' faces: “Show
us the national dilemma, in your faces. It's beautiful. Your
anxieties, your agonies. … Show us you, trying to be better,
mortally afraid.” That strange, glorious character, “the beauty
of things”, in Oh, the Humanity itself, gazes out at the audience
too, struck by their trust, their innocence. “Your faces. So
fragile, so certain. The majesty.”

In the weeks between seeing Oh, the
Humanity in London and Edinburgh, I took an unexpected swerve
off-road, and whereas in Edinburgh I heard people desperate for love,
in London I heard a terror of dying alone. Looking again at the text,
I realise both interpretations are circumstantial: what radiates from
the writing is hope and an astonishment at human resilience. Because
disappointment strikes so early, doesn't it? Rewind to Thom Pain:
“When did your childhood end? How badly did you get hurt, when you
did, when you were this little, when you were this wee little
hurtable thing, nothing but big eyes, a heart, a few hundred words?
Isn't it wonderful how we never recover?” The man and woman
struggling to film portraits of themselves for personal ads in Ladies
and Gentlemen, the Rain, are accumulations of disappointment, and yet
devastatingly hopeful, clinging to their images of future
contentment. The sports coach, in the midst of the “punishing
crushing nauseating sorrow” that floods from his sense of personal
and professional failure, argues still: “I think I should be happy.
I do. I think we should all be very terribly proud and happy, and
happy and afraid, and afraid and thrilled, really thrilled to death
at the upcoming year and all of the life it will naturally contain.”
Eno's characters are hypnotised by the teeming excess of the world
around them: one after another they list its plenitude with wonder
and a note of horror. How does one define oneself, fix a place for
oneself, in that confused morass? By settling down with someone else?
Maybe. But the married couple in Oh, the Humanity feel no less alone
than anyone else: the husband cries for help, tells his wife “I
don't know who I am”, and all she says is, “There there.” They
are two Is who have failed to become we. Maybe the best we can do is
as Thom Pain says: “Just be yourself. Keep in mind how little time
there is, how little time there always was. Then try to be brave. Try
to be someone else. Someone better.”

Walking along the river to Tate Modern
for my second run at Tino Sehgal, I read another Eno monologue, which
I think holds a key to this little I know of his work. It's called
Lady Grey (in ever-lower light), and (in the absence of any
biographical information to contradict this thought) reads like notes
in preparation for Thom Pain. It is a direct address to an audience,
a story of a broken child, a cry of anguish, with Lady Grey
stuttering at the moment of loss: “When the person who speaks to
your soul doesn't talk to you any more.” Everything merges in this
passage, detailing the child, Jennifer's show-and-tell experience at
school:

And what have you brought in for us,
today?, the teacher asks.

This, says Jennifer, holding nothing.

The children sit there, like you, and
she takes off her black shoes. It was nice to be held, to not feel
alone. She takes off her socks. The children, like you, say nothing.
Like my weakling, the town crier, now departed. For my thing, I
brought in this, she says, and takes off her dress, her underwear.
She is naked before them. He said nice things, sometimes, when he
spoke. I thought he was fewer people. This is my arms. This is from
where I fell once. The teacher is slowly hyperventilating. These are
my little feet, she says, pointing. This is for being a girl. I like
running. A pet dog someone brought in barks. Hands slowly go up.
Where did you get it, one boy asks. It's mine, she says. Can we touch
it, a boy with asthma asks, breathing wonder. Jennifer stands still.
He told me I was beautiful. I started thinking I was beautiful. Some
of the children cried. I don't have anything. I have a house and some
family and people I know and toys and I don't have anything. She
stands there. I stand here. Naked and controlling the shaking. Trying
to fall in love with breathing. Everyone looking and seeing.

Intentionally or otherwise, all of
Eno's characters have a moment of becoming naked before our eyes.
Often, it's excruciating, as when the airline spokeswoman speaks of
her father's death, and says: “Countless nights beneath relatively
fatherly men did nothing to lift the weight of that sad time.” But
that nakedness is also glimpsed in the struggle for
self-articulation: words are all we have to tell others about our
true selves, and so often, words fail us. “We hear the word love a
lot, throw it around,” says Thom Pain. “Less and less maybe but
still a lot. The word love. We mean all sorts of things. I don't
know. It's really... on this freezing... how anybody... or we were
probably... damn it. He couldn't see the story through.” As much as
it bolsters us, love scars.

It's in this idea of emotional
nakedness that I've finally started figuring out what my problem
might have been with getinthebackofthevan's Big
Hits, which I saw at Soho with Andrew
Haydon and Megan
Vaughan, on the recommendation of Matt
Trueman. The three of them cover the show, so
I'll just say this one thing. Big
Hits is a slow (irritatingly slow – 100 minutes of slow) journey
towards nakedness, but a cynical one. Lucy McCormick wants to perform
for us, so she sings Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah,
and wonders what suffering she can experience to make her delivery
more truthful, more affecting. She enacts domestic violence and
exposes her breast. She simulates sex and slaps her own arse until it
glows raw red. It is, as Matt says, “a roar of disgust at the
world’s hollow frivolity”. I see that. But watching it, I felt
nothing. And that's because, for all her willingness to be naked,
right down to exposing her own anus, the one thing Lucy never shows
us is her soul.